Pertussis making a comeback

Adults who have contact with babies are urged to get vaccinated.

Pertussis, or whooping cough, is making a come-back nationally and in the… (GETTY IMAGES, GEORGE FREY )

November 25, 2012|By Tim Darragh, Of The Morning Call

With the holidays, health officials want adults — especially parents, favorite aunts and uncles and grandparents of newborns — to give those babies an extra gift.

Tdap.

Tdap is shorthand for tetanus, diphtheria and acellular pertussis, the three-in-one booster vaccine that's given to adolescents and adults. It's increasingly important because pertussis, also known as whooping cough, is raging across the United States and Pennsylvania.

Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the contagious respiratory illness is reaching a 50-year high. It's peaking locally, too.

"Our number of cases as of the end of October is three times what we had last year," said Vicki Kistler, director of the Allentown Health Bureau. "So that's going right along with the national trend."

Several schools, including some in the Salisbury Township and Allentown school districts, have sent notices to families in recent weeks about the potential for exposure to pertussis.

In many places, the number of cases over the last 10 months has far exceeded the number of cases in all of 2011.

Lehigh County had recorded 82 cases of pertussis through Nov. 9, according to provisional data from the Pennsylvania Health Department. In all of last year, it recorded 31. Northampton County had 23 cases, more than triple all of 2011's total, the data showed.

Pennsylvania, where reported cases are close to 1,600 — more than double all of last year — and 47 other states are experiencing caseloads unseen in decades. As of Oct. 27, the CDC estimated there were 34,000 cases nationwide and 16 deaths.

Pertussis may appear to be a bad cold or an allergic reaction in adults, but it can be fatal to infants, Kistler said.

"One of the things we stress, especially around holidays, is to make sure adults who are going to have contact with newborns and young children … get vaccinated," she said. "A lot of times it's hidden pertussis," Kistler said, "and the little ones pay the price."

In addition, the CDC in October recommended that all pregnant women get booster shots, a move that would provide immediate benefit to newborns.

Young children are vulnerable because their vaccines are given in a series of five shots, with the fifth vaccination ideally occurring between ages 4 and 6, according to the National Institutes of Health. The Tdap vaccine is a booster to the vaccinations approved for very young children.

Pertussis is spread when an infected person coughs or sneezes and another person inhales the bacteria. It is treated with antibiotics.

Without treatment, people can develop a persistent cough that can last for weeks. Pertussis got the name "whooping cough" because of the sound that an individual makes when gasping for air after a fit of coughing.

Kistler said no one is sure why the pertussis outbreak has occurred in such strength. It could be that the germ has mutated and is not blocked as well by the vaccination, she said.

But Donna Cary of Sanofi Pasteur in Swiftwater, one of the manufacturers of the vaccine, said the bacteria is the same strain that has circulated in the U.S. for the past 30 years.

A New England Journal of Medicine story published Aug. 30 offered another reason for the seriousness of the outbreak: that the vaccine for the very young is waning in efficacy. According to the Journal, pertussis epidemics in 2005 and 2010 and this year "suggest that failure of the …vaccine is a matter of serious concern."

The vaccine is 80-85 percent effective, said Cary, noting that no vaccine is 100 percent effective.

Still, health officials strongly recommend beginning the vaccination regimen in newborns and the state Department of Health requires students to get a booster shot before entering seventh grade, as long as it has been five years since their last diphtheria and tetanus shot.

An additional complication is that more parents are not having their children follow the full schedule of vaccinations. CDC data show that the percentage of children with at least four shots peaked at 86 percent in 2005 and has dropped two points since then. Children who do not receive the full schedule of vaccinations are eight times more likely to get pertussis than those who do, the CDC says.

The CDC says only 8 percent of adults have received their pertussis booster.

Cary and officials at another vaccine manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline, said the supply of the vaccine is sufficient to meet the public's needs.